APSA Citation Generator

APSA citation examples

The same two sources appear on every CiteTools generator page, so you can compare styles side by side.

APSA in-text citations

Parenthetical

(LeCun, Bengio, and Hinton 2015)

Narrative

LeCun, Bengio, and Hinton (2015)

With a page number

(LeCun, Bengio, and Hinton 2015, 438)

How APSA formats a reference

• Only the first author is inverted, and the others follow in normal order. The word and, never an ampersand, joins the last two.
• The year is the second element, straight after the authors, which is why APSA is called an author-date style.
• Titles use headline-style capitals. Article and chapter titles take quotation marks, and book and journal titles are italic.
• The issue follows the volume in parentheses, and the pages follow a colon and a space: Nature 521 (7553): 436–44.
• A page range keeps the last two digits that change, so pages 436 to 444 are written 436–44.
• A DOI follows the pages as doi: and a space and the number. A book names its place before its publisher: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Who uses APSA style

APSA style comes from the Style Manual for Political Science of the American Political Science Association. The association journals follow it, and so do many courses in political science and international relations. The manual builds on the author-date system of The Chicago Manual of Style. A citation in the text is the surname and the year in parentheses, with no comma between them. A comma and the page follow the year when you point to a page. A source with four or more authors is cited by the first author and et al.

Frequently asked questions